A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe

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A Prophet
of the People
 Afr i can Hi story and C u lt u re

series editor
Peter Alegi, Michigan State University

African History and Culture is a book series that builds upon and expands
Michigan State University’s commitment to the study of Africa. The series features
books on African history, anthropology, sociology, and political science, as well as
interdisciplinary studies, works on the African diaspora, and digital scholarship.

international editorial board

Nwando Achebe, Michigan State University
Walter Hawthorne, Michigan State University
Yusufu Lawi, University of Dar es Salaam
Peter Limb, Michigan State University
Ghislaine Lydon, University of California, Los Angeles
Gregory Mann, Columbia University
Enocent Msindo, Rhodes University
David Newbury, Smith College
David Robinson, Michigan State University
Abdi Samatar, University of Minnesota
Robert Trent Vinson, University of Virginia
A Prophet
of the People
ISAIAH SHEMBE AND THE MAKING
OF A SOUTH AFRICAN CHURCH

Lauren V. Jarvis

Michigan State University Press | East Lansing

 Copyright © 2024 by Lauren V. Jarvis

p
Michigan State University Press
East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5245

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Jarvis, Lauren V., author.
Title: A prophet of the people : Isaiah Shembe and the making of a South African church / Lauren V. Jarvis.
Description: First edition. | East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, 2024.
| Series: African history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023021707 | ISBN 9781611864847 (paperback) | ISBN 9781609177522 (pdf) | ISBN 9781628955170 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Shembe, Isaiah, –1935. | Church of the Nazarites—History. | Independent churches—South Africa—History.
Classification: LCC BX7068.7.Z8 S758 2024 | DDC 289.93092—dc23/eng/20230509
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021707

Cover design by Shaun Allshouse, www.shaunallshouse.com

Cover photo: Shembe surrounded by a group of girls and women at Ekuphakameni in the early 1930s.
Photograph used with permission of Campbell Collections, UKZN.

Visit Michigan State University Press at www.msupress.org

In memory of Dawn V. Jarvis
Contents

ix Acknowledgments
xiii Introduction

1 Chapter 1. An Inheritor in the Free State

21 Chapter 2. A Baptist in Town
37 Chapter 3. An Evangelist in Durban
53 Chapter 4. A Guest in the Reserves
71 Chapter 5. A Landowner in Inanda
91 Chapter 6. A Matchmaker at Ekuphakameni
111 Chapter 7. A Dissident in Southern Zululand
131 Chapter 8. A Celebrity in South Africa
153 Conclusion

165 Notes
247 Bibliography
285 Index
Acknowledgments
A C K N OW L E D G M E N TS

I love reading acknowledgments. They let me imagine what someone else’s

life is like: the details and the influences, the people and places that mattered, and
the moments when they did. That desire—to imagine another person’s life—is
what made me want to write this book. I learned while writing it that I do not
really know how to revise—only how to re-do. Oftentimes, so much re-doing felt
like a burden. But now that I am finally finishing, so much re-doing seems like the
biggest privilege. So, let me offer a window into my life and all the people who gave
me the space, time, and encouragement to finish.
I’m going to start with family. My mom, Dawn V. Jarvis, passed away unexpect-
edly as I was nearing the end of this project. So much of the good in my life comes
from her fierce sense of what was right and her courage to be different. She was
the bravest person I have ever met. My mom as well as Kaye de Kruif, Donna Jarvis,
Kathryn Jarvis and Greg Propp, Kimberly Jarvis and James Greene, Jarvis and Tyler
Greene (and now their families too) showered me with so much love through it all.
So did honorary family. I am looking at you, Erica Edelman. Charles and Virginia
Jarvis are no longer living, but their influences are everywhere—from the photos I
looked at on my desk to the nagging but loving voice I heard, saying “If I were you,
I’d just get that book done.” (I’m working on it, Grandma!)

| ix
x | Acknowledgments

More recent additions to my family made innumerable contributions. Al-

exander Charles and Dashiell McRae Jarvis-Duncan brought joy, laughter, and
much-needed perspective, regularly reminding me that there were more important
things than what was wrong with my chapter. Of course, my kids could play such
a fulfilling role in my life because I have an equal partner who helped make it so.
Al Duncan, there are words. They are all insufficient.
Thank you to the many people who have cared for our kids while we were
at work and even, a few times, on vacation. This includes some people already
mentioned, especially Dawn Jarvis, Kaye de Kruif, and Donna Jarvis, but also Russ
and Sue Duncan, Helena and all of the Pesonens, and the terrific teachers at several
day cares and preschools in South Africa and the United States. Alesha Foushee
and the women at Childcare Matters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, have built
something so magical. This will sound awkward, but thanks for creating a place
where I felt so happy to leave my kids.
I was lucky as an undergraduate to see people who made me want to be a
historian—people who cared about students and made it clear why their work
mattered. Thanks to Bob Korstad and Karin Shapiro for playing that role then and
now. Thanks to Karin, too, for reading so many drafts and talking through so many
ideas at Namu in Durham and then over Zoom when the pandemic would not
allow Namu anymore.
In graduate school, I was around a cohort of brilliant women in African history,
some who stayed in academia and some who moved on. I think of them often.
Katie McDonough, thanks for being such a dear friend and for hanging out with
me on three continents during the process of finishing this book. Jim Campbell,
Sean Hanretta, and Richard Roberts provided many free meals and much goodwill.
I am grateful to have been around such gracious people as I tried to figure out what
it meant to be a historian.
In South Africa, I owe so much to archivists, other scholars, and countless
kind people. My thanks above all to the Nazaretha who welcomed me into their
worship services and homes and took the time to tell me their stories. I know that
my interpretations of Shembe’s life are quite different from theirs, but I also know
that their ability to tell his story will always be more compelling and powerful than
mine. The inimitable, brilliant Mwelela Cele provided some of the translations
that transformed this project, including a key set of articles in iLanga lase Natal.
Audrey Mbeje is the most talented language professor I have ever met. I was lucky
 Acknowledgments | xi

to be her student. A song she taught us in class gave me a last-minute insight about
what it meant for a young Nazaretha woman to be called umakoti before marriage.
Constance Dlamini Mkhize, thanks for riding around with me to various
far-flung destinations (sometimes in the middle of the night), nudging me when I
wanted to slink off without knocking on more doors, and providing such wonderful
company through it all. The reality of inequality in South Africa means that someone
recommended as a house cleaner is, in fact, the most phenomenal ethnographer
and interviewer you have ever met. Here’s to a future in which more South Africans
have opportunities to use their many talents.
A remarkable group of people who study KwaZulu-Natal have been the most
patient of listeners and the dearest of friends: Brady G’sell, Meghan Healy-Clancy,
Jill Kelly, Liz Timbs, and T. J. Tallie. Thank you for greeting every one of my eureka
emails with enthusiasm and for helping me keep my head in the game.
I have the best colleagues, who have encouraged me, laughed with me, and
reminded me what is possible in an academic career. From Utah, Beth Clement
is the only person who has ever made me nostalgic for faculty meetings—or at
least for faculty meetings in her company. At the University of North Carolina,
I’m so grateful to Lisa Lindsay and Emily Burrill (before the University of Virginia
whisked her away) for being kind role models and good friends in my field. The
same applies to Susan Pennybacker in an adjacent field too. Louise McReynolds,
Ron Williams, Sharon James, and Corry Arnold have offered so much good advice
and commiseration over burgers and generously shared beverages in my front yard.
Katie Turk and Molly Worthen are terrific scholars and kind people. I am lucky to
count them as colleagues and friends.
To students at Stanford, San Francisco State, Utah, and UNC, I cannot tell you
the many ways you have helped me understand South African and African history
better. A few among this remarkable crew deserve mention: Sarah Bowers, Georgia
Brunner, Kennedy Gandy, Kimathi Muiruri, and Alex Peeples. The graduate students
at UNC have also helped me understand my work better and left me marveling
at all that they are doing. Thanks to Nancy Andoh, Laura Cox, Kaela Thuney, and
Abbey Warchol.
I feel very lucky that so many of the people who have already studied the Naz-
aretha were kind and encouraging at the prospect of another book about Shembe.
Thanks to Joel Cabrita, Liz Gunner, Carol Muller, and Nkosinathi Sithole. Above all,
your rich, compelling interpretations made me want to learn more. I’m grateful to
xii | Acknowledgments

many people, some no longer living, who embarked on ambitious projects to record
Nazaretha testimonies, songs, and histories to make them accessible, including,
again, Liz Gunner and Carol Muller as well as Irving Hexham, Hans-Jürgen Becken,
Bongani Mthethwa, G. C. Oosthuizen, and Robert Papini. Because some of these
projects involved teams of people, many unnamed in the final result, thanks to
them too.
I appreciated feedback from Daniel Magaziner, Derek Peterson, and Robert
Trent Vinson on an earlier version of this project as well as the feedback from the
anonymous reviewers at Michigan State University Press. Thanks to Peter Alegi for
thinking this could be something and to Caitlin Tyler-Richards, whose influence
and good ideas helped get me over the finish line.
Along the way, the Fulbright-Hays program, the Mellon/ACLS program, and
the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC helped fund my research and
this publication.
I will close with convention: despite the many people who made this book
possible, the mistakes are, of course, my own.
IN T ROD U C T IO N

Introduction

In 1910, Isaiah Shembe was just over forty years old. He had already been a
farm tenant, a family patriarch, a sanitation worker, and a wandering faith healer.1
Most recently, he had become a Baptist evangelist for a fledgling church that sent
him to one of South Africa’s most dangerous mission fields for African Christians.
The trip required not only a new name and a disguise, but some of his own funding
too.2 The cost was one reason why he gave up. His lack of success was another.3
But then in 1910, the very year that South Africa became one place on a map,
Shembe’s evangelical fortunes started to change. He began to find more people who
would listen to his preaching or try his healing in places where he faced fewer threats
of arrest and vigilantism.4 By the mid-1910s, he became the leader of his own church,
the Nazaretha or Nazarites, a name that referenced “a vow of separation to the Lord”
in the Old Testament.5 Over the next twenty years, that church grew to include tens
of thousands of people, with worship sites scattered through South Africa’s eastern
coast and reaching north into current-day Eswatini.6 Church membership included
people from across many of South Africa’s social fractures—race, ethnicity, and
chiefdom as well as gender, generation, and geography—if they came, nevertheless,
from among those left behind by South Africa’s industrializing economy. By the
1930s, people knew of Shembe not only as a church leader but also as a wealthy

| xiii
xiv | Introduction

healer and landowner, as the father-in-law of a Zulu king, and as the father of
sons who had attended the best schools open to Africans in segregation-era South
Africa. Many knew of him too as someone who had evaded and openly defied state
authority with seeming impunity. For his supporters, this added to the scale and
scope of his miracles.7
In the last years of his life, Shembe’s followers spoke as if his stunning success
had always been a part of God’s plan. Even before Shembe’s birth, they said his
mother had heard a voice that she would have “a son to be praised.”8 But, to return
again to 1910, observers then would have seen someone different: a man who could
not read or write, a man who had recently been married to three wives, and a man
whose first mission had ended with little to show. They might have guessed that
Shembe would soon return to sanitation work.
Shembe’s remarkable rise has captivated the attention of many people for nearly
a century. As early as 1927, a short article appeared in a South African newspaper,
describing Shembe as a “herd boy turned healer.”9 Three years later, the Illustrated
London News included a feature about Shembe for readers on another continent,
puzzling over him as a “man of no learning but great wisdom” whose story was
“romantic and inspiring.”10 In 1936, just one year after Shembe died, the first printed
book about him appeared in isiZulu, the main language spoken by Shembe and
the majority of the people in his church. Edited by one of Shembe’s neighbors,
the politician and educator John Dube, the book’s introduction noted that some
people—including Dube himself—“found fault” with Shembe, but that a “person
who is followed by so many thousands (as [Shembe] is), who has bought so much
land, who has become better off than all the Black people, hawu [wow]! Of such a
person the Black people desire to know.”11
Since Shembe’s death in 1935, the continued growth of the Nazaretha Church
has helped sustain interest in its founder. Today the church is split between
competing congregations, but altogether these rival branches count millions of
members.12 Their ranks include celebrity converts; their dramas inspire television
shows; and their events are venues for politicians hoping to consolidate support.13 In
2017, shortly before becoming South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa appeared
sitting on the ground and barefoot (to follow the Nazaretha rules of worship) at
one of their largest gatherings. At the event, he requested that church members
“pray for the ANC [African National Congress],” South Africa’s governing party.14 His
request was a double indication of the world Shembe had helped make—not only
because the Nazaretha mattered enough for Ramaphosa to visit, but also because
FIGURE 1. Isaiah Shembe, ca. 1930.
PHOTOGRAPH INCLUDED WITH PERMISSION OF CAMPBELL COLLECTIONS, UKZN.
xvi | Introduction

Christianity had become such a taken-for-granted part of life for South Africans
that a Black presidential candidate in 2017 would have no qualms asking for prayers.
The first scholarly account of Shembe’s life appeared in 1936, the same year as
Dube’s biography, when a white South African woman submitted her master’s thesis
in anthropology at the University of Natal.15 Since then, scholars across disciplines
have explored the sources of Shembe’s “genius” and talents, focusing on how he
“revitalized society” or “constituted a new hybrid regime of religious truth.”16 Recent
major revisions of church history have emphasized the roles of texts—written, spo-
ken, and sung—in bolstering Shembe’s authority and consolidating the Nazaretha
community.17 And yet, for all of the attention that the Nazaretha have received,
questions remain about why and how Shembe became an emblem of a changing
South Africa.
By approaching Shembe differently—by following him through the places
he lived, visited, and learned to avoid—one draws new insights not only about
Shembe’s success but also about his world. In his nearly seven decades, Shembe
transformed into a prophet of the people in many senses of the phrase: as he
absorbed ideas from others around him, managed constraints to make new
converts and allies, and crafted popular appeal that resonated with his left-behind
community. Along the way, Shembe’s actions and decisions expose processes that
defined modern South Africa. How, for example, did Christianity saturate public
life so rapidly after 1900?18 And how did South Africa give rise to so many broad
coalitions—not only churches such as the Nazaretha but also social-movement
trade unions and the multiracial, tripartite alliance of a political party still in power
today?19 Why did men imagined as saviors—whether sacred, secular, or somewhere
in between—often stand at the helm of these coalitions?20 And why, speaking to
events in the news in late 2022, might the same president who asked for Nazaretha
prayers be embroiled in a scandal over money hidden in his couch?21 Shembe’s life
on the move in an industrializing era shows how people laced together the spread
of Christianity with strategies of evasion and models of community that continue
to shape South Africa today.

The Life of an Individual

Many historians remain skeptical that one life can reveal much of anything about
the past. And yet, there is an ongoing turn toward studies of individuals in African
 Introduction | xvii

history.22 Most of these accounts sit somewhere outside the field of traditional
biography; instead, they use strategies gleaned from critical biography and mi-
crohistory to generate meaning by placing one life in broader contexts. As Jacob
Dlamini explains in an example of this genre, the story of his subject, a South African
freedom-fighter-turned-collaborator, “needs to be painted on a larger canvas.”23
Within this biographical turn, studies of individuals continue to meet many
ends. Some affirm the basic principle of social history: that ordinary people have
important things to tell us about the past.24 Others, including this one, use individ-
uals who were not considered ordinary during their lifetimes to offer new vantage
points for understanding periods of rapid transformation.25 Although Shembe
shared characteristics with many people, his exceptional mobility and, with it, his
willingness to go places where others would not, make him a compelling, if atypical,
subject for understanding a changing South Africa.
Altogether, the many biographical accounts add detail, texture, names, and
specifics to the historical record. This may not seem like a significant political
intervention to some, but the long-enduring links between the African continent
and an imagined absence of individualism still make it one. Shembe lived in a
world in which white government officials debated the dangers of attempts to
“individualize people who are not fit for individualism.”26 Notions of the primacy of
group identity persisted after Shembe died, as evidenced by some of the scholarship
that would be written, in fact, about the Nazaretha.27 Studies of individuals can
continue to correct for that long history even as few scholars today would write of
a singular “African mind,” as some once did.
In this case, too, the life of a particular individual provides a front-row seat from
which to observe the emergence of a different kind of leadership.28 Max Weber
defined a certain quality, charisma, to begin explaining these processes. In Weber’s
formulation, charismatic authority emerged from “powers or properties that are not
found in everyone and that are thought to be the gift of God.” 29 Charismatic leaders
were heroes and miracle workers—people who did the seemingly impossible and,
as a result, inspired intense devotion. Their authority was, in Weber’s understanding,
fundamentally disruptive, untethering people from other connections. Weber saw
examples of this authority in a range of figures, from American Indian shamans
to the early Mormon leader Joseph Smith, all of whom collected people in new
configurations of belonging.30
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, by contrast, explored not a quality but a
category of person: “big men.” Based on his research in Oceania, Sahlins sketched
xviii | Introduction

out a portrait of people who often had remarkable skills, whether as healers,
gardeners, or warriors, but who also maneuvered, politicked, and negotiated to
create a following bigger than their families alone. “Big men” were distinctive
because they were not chiefs who inherited their authority. As a result, the ties
of loyalty and obligation created between “big men” and their followers had to be
“continually reinforced.” As Sahlins saw it, being a “big man”—or a “fisher of men,”
as he also called them—was hard work.31
Notions of “charisma” and “big men” have moved in many directions since their
initial articulations. While once the domain of sociologists and psychologists, the
idea of charisma is currently attracting greater interest from historians, who are
sketching out the contexts that produced different formulations of charisma as
well as the qualities that defined it at different places and times.32 “Big men,” in
turn, moved from the anthropology of Oceania to the anthropology and history
of Africa in the 1960s and 1970s because it dovetailed nicely with foundational
concepts in African studies, including foremost “wealth in people,” or the idea
that accumulation among African elites came from access to human resources
more than private property.33 As political scientists attended to one-party states
and authoritarian regimes on the African continent after the 1960s, the idea of “big
men” became more narrowly linked to kleptocratic leaders and patronage politics.34
In the meantime, scholars in other fields reframed their approach. 35 Historians
of Africa are now more likely to ask questions, in the terms Kathryn de Luna has
posed, about how leaders and followers “crafted dependencies”—that is how they
“invented clans, royalty, guilds, and healing cults,” for example, through “manip-
ulation of speech and knowledge” as well as “control of material resources.”36 De
Luna’s framing points to complexity and relationships—between ordinary people
and leaders, between ideas and things—that allow for fuller contextualization of
an individual’s experience.
It is easy to draw parallels between Shembe’s life and the different ways that
scholars have explained new categories of leadership. Still, Sahlins’s idea of the effort
demanded of “big men,” when considered alongside de Luna’s calls for attention to
relationships, offers the most helpful framework for understanding Shembe. Put
simply, Shembe hustled. His unconventional path to Christianity meant that, from
the start, he lacked the knowledge and connections held by many other African
Christians and church leaders. As Shembe became an evangelist anyway, South
Africa’s complicated rationing of authority produced innumerable hurdles. Shembe
had to find places where he would not be caught, whether by state officials or
 Introduction | xix

vigilantes angry about his presence. He had to find people who might be tractable
and then grapple with the many ways that those people might want to use him
too. As he moved from place to place, moreover, and pulled people together in one
community, he had to manage the resultant conflicts and contradictions as well
as the many antagonisms that he and his church accumulated. For Shembe, these
efforts were often difficult and dangerous—even after his evangelical fortunes
began to improve in 1910. More than once, he came close to disaster. But with luck,
savvy, and dogged determinism, Shembe and other members of the church found
ways to weave such challenges into the fabric of their community.

Defining an Era

The backdrop for Shembe’s life is a mottled map affected by sweeping but uneven
change. Shembe’s birth in the late 1860s coincided with the diamond rush that
jumpstarted South Africa’s industrial revolution, drawing people into new patterns
of work, community, and daily life.37 His death in 1935 occurred amid South Africa’s
recovery from the Great Depression and amid a global rise of fascism that would
usher in apartheid in the 1940s.38 Within this period, 1910 represented an important
pivot as the Act of Union made South Africa one political entity.39 Union had
profound consequences in Shembe’s life, too, contributing to the turnaround in
his evangelical fortunes. And yet, 1910 also represented a midpoint more than an
endpoint. Shembe’s trajectory and this era of South Africa’s history were defined
by features cutting across the span from the 1870s to the 1930s.40
First was the dramatic realignment of labor and, with it, the wrenching apart
of African communities by gender and generation across urban and rural space.
Scholars of South African history have shown how African social structures shaped
the growth of industrial capitalism and, as a result, why groups of young African
men were the first to leave their rural homes to earn wages through migrant work,
leaving elder men, women, and children behind.41 But if the structure of African
communities helped mold South Africa’s emergent working class, so did a rash of
restrictions, some imposed by the state and some imposed by African families,
attempting to keep women and children in rural areas—and to keep wage-earning
men coming back to them.42 By the early 1910s, the skewed ratios of African men
and women in urban and rural space were peaking in many parts of South Africa.
In Durban, for example, a city that Shembe visited as an evangelist, the 1911 census
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Metadata

Title: The poetic

Edda
Author: Henry Info
Adams https://viaf.org/viaf/5294877/
Bellows
(1885–
1939)
File 2024-05-
generation 04
date: 10:27:49
UTC
Language: English
Original [1923]
publication
date:

Encoding
The foot-notes in the source, which are linked to line-
numbers, have been moved to the end of each chapter.

Revision History
2024-03-18 Started.

Corrections
The following 46 corrections have been applied to the
text:

Page Source Correction Edit

distance
N.A.,
84,
246,
314,
373,
421, [Not in
572 source] . 1
15,
19 lacunae lacunæ 2
19 Gniparhellir Gnipahellir 1
58 “ [Deleted] 1
84 encyclopedic encyclopædic 1
99, Hlok Hlokk 1
99
121 stan a stanza 1
129 characterised characterized 1
143 s as 1
216,
324, [Not in
429 source] ” 1
225 Smaland Småland 1/0
227 detroyed destroyed 1
253 folk tales folk-tales 1
274 Hjorvath’s Hjorvarth’s 1
291 Hundingbane Hundingsbane 1
306 Spornvitnir Sporvitnir 1
307 Hynduljoth Hyndluljoth 1
310,
559,
560,
572,
572,
577,
579 . , 1
312,
313,
330,
538 , . 1
326 work word 1
359 be he 1
404 vengance vengeance 1
433 vengence vengeance 1
511 ” [Deleted] 1
532 Line 4 may [Deleted] 24
 be spurious.
568 Haddings - Haddings’-
Hero Hero 1
571 Hrīm″-gerth- Hrīm″-gerth-
a-mǭl′ ar-mǭl′ 1
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POETIC
EDDA ***

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